“In the future, Americans — assuming there are any left — will look back at 2016 and remark: ‘What the HELL?’” American humourist Dave Barry wrote in his retrospective on 2016. “If years were relatives, 2016 would be the uncle who shows up at your Thanksgiving dinner wearing his underpants on the outside.”

Likening it to “a choice between ointment and suppository,” the U.S. presidential election was Barry’s prime example of the mess that 2016 turned out to be.

“CNN told us over and over that Donald Trump was a colossally ignorant, narcissistic, out-of-control sex-predator buffoon; Fox News countered that Hillary Clinton was a greedy, corrupt, coldly calculating liar of massive ambition and minimal accomplishment.”

“And in our hearts we knew the awful truth: They were both right.”

The absurdities of 2016 extended beyond the United States. The British — mainly the English — voted in June to leave the European Union, despite the possibility of a renewed bid for Scottish independence (continued membership in the E.U., popular in Scotland, having been one of the factors that prompted Scots to vote against separating from Britain in 2014), and the unraveling of the hard-won Irish peace (Northern Ireland also having voted against leaving the E.U.)

In other populist revolts, the Austrian far-right came uncomfortably close to winning the 2016 presidential election, and recent polls showed Marine Le Pen, of the anti-immigrant Front National, running a close second in the run-up to the 2017 French presidential race.

The strange mood has even crept into Canada, where the presumptive front-runner for the leadership of the Conservative Party — the party which has governed Canada for half of the past 30 years — is Kevin O’Leary, a comically abrasive businessman turned full-time TV personality, with no political experience, who brandishes a spatula in a Dec. 24 YouTube video and vows to take it to Ottawa and “scrape all that crap out”. (To his credit, O’Leary has avoided the anti-immigrant sentiment of Kellie Leitch, the Winnipeg-born Conservative leadership candidate whose capacity for getting attention through mean-spiritedness has not so far given her lasting momentum.)

What is behind the bitter mood that made 2016 the year of Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen and the slowly rising weirdness of the Conservative leadership race?

The most probable explanation comes from the book Viking Economics by George Lakey, a retired professor and peace activist. In the book, he contrasts the sense of mutual security and trust that citizens of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland feel with the chronic insecurity of life in the United States — not to mention other countries, to varying degrees.

The United States operates a different economic model, which values insecurity . . . A family depends on a job that might disappear tomorrow; it lands in a feeble safety net; it has few prospects for finding another job as good or better. Small wonder that U.S. unions sometimes defend inefficient labor practices and outmoded organization of work, even though undermining productivity — whatever it takes to keep workers in jobs. In other words, compared with the high-productivity Nordic model, the U.S. insecurity approach creates an incentive to resist efficiency.

Lakey contrasts the American tendency to resist a social safety net with the freedom that a strong social safety net has given Nordic business owners to experiment with new ways of doing things, and to Nordic unions to accept and even welcome such changes.

There is reason to believe that the Nordic approach has secured positive results. The 2016 World Competitiveness Scoreboard places fifth-place Sweden and sixth-place Denmark just behind the third-place U.S. (and ahead of tenth-place Canada) in its ranking of the world’s most competitive economies. China and Switzerland took the top two spots.

And there is reason to believe that chronic insecurity takes a toll on people, and on their faith in democracy.

As Jacob Hacker points out in The Great Risk Shift, the US government has deliberately privatised risk in the name of ‘personal responsibility’ by dismantling large parts of the social insurance system, and it has done so at a time when macro-economic changes have actually increased threats to economic security.

[. . .]

. . .[P]rior research demonstrates that political trust is vital to the good functioning of contemporary polities. One possible remedy for low trust would be to halt and then reverse the privatisation of risk by bringing the government back in. Comparative European data show that countries with more extensive welfare systems generally experience higher levels of political trust, possibly because welfare protects people against insecurity. However, the major progressive reforms that may help restore trust in the US are primed to fail precisely because trust is so low. Distrusting citizens, which constitute a large majority of all Americans, are less likely than trusting citizens to support major liberal reforms to the welfare state; indeed, they are more likely to support conservative alternatives that further privatise risk and, in turn, further increase insecurity. Such is the irony of the politics of trust.

Indeed, in 2014, three French researchers examined the relationship between the comprehensiveness of the social safety net in OECD member-countries and the degree to which the citizens of those countries trusted one another. They found that countries that were more polarized between trustworthy and untrustworthy — or “civic” and “uncivic” — individuals had the greatest difficulty supporting an effective social safety net.

Uncivic citizens, the sort who evade their tax obligations while seeking to extract all they can from social benefits, will support the expansion of the welfare state more strongly than civic citizens will, since they expect to benefit the most from it while shirking the costs. A rise in the share of uncivic citizens could thus increase the demand for a generous welfare state. However, an opposing force is also at play. Civic citizens will be less inclined to support high taxes if they expect to be surrounded by uncivic individuals who do not pay taxes and abuse social benefits . . . [But an increase in support] appears when everyone is civic. In this situation, all individuals strongly support the welfare state because nobody cheats on taxes and social benefits.

So, in short, what went wrong that gave the world the upcoming Trump presidency and Brexit debacle? A safe bet is that the U.S. and the U.K. fell into a “distrust trap”: a culture of economic insecurity, and resentment at feeling abandoned to fend for themselves by politicians who went on to live comfortable lives separate from the wider community, killed trust in politicians. Meanwhile, difficulty trusting fellow citizens made a strong social safety net that would ease their burdens unsustainable.

The lesson? Trust matters. With it, a society thrives. Without it, a society begins to fall apart.

Between 2005 and 2009, the World Values Survey asked people around the world if they felt that “most people can be trusted”. In Norway and Sweden, with their strong social safety nets and high levels of confidence in their parliaments, two-thirds or more of citizens agreed that, yes, most people can be trusted. In the U.S., however, only 39 percent considered most others trustworthy; and in the U.K., just 30 percent felt this way.

As for Canada: we were barely more likely than the Americans to trust our compatriots, with 42 percent of us considering most other people to be trustworthy. Never assume that a Donald Trump can’t happen here.

Usually, when you hear about staff being required to sign non-compete agreements as a condition of employment, it’s easy to assume that this only applies to the big-shots: executives, senior managers, people with intimate knowledge of corporate strategy, and so on, and surely not to a 19-year-old restaurant server or even a 24-year-old shift supervisor at a suburban fast-food outlet.

Think again. In a country where so many feel that “the little guy” is condemned to always end up with the short end of the stick that many have turned to Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders as would-be saviours, a news story appeared this past week that might just reaffirm their suspicions.

Under the agreement, the ban on working for even marginal competitors remained in effect for two years after leaving Jimmy John’s.

The non-compete agreement was almost certainly designed as a bluff to discourage staff turnover, not with the intent of actually enforcing it. Enforcement would have required:

a.) Keeping track of former employees’ whereabouts, or somehow finding out that the former employee had landed a job at Subway a mile and a half away, 15 months later (possible, but unlikely);

b.) Giving enough of a damn about the alleged breach to actually attempt to hold the former employee to the terms of the non-compete agreement (extremely unlikely for a low-wage job, and unlikely even in some better-compensated, mid-level jobs, if the path of least resistance was to just ignore the whole matter), and;

c.) If all else failed, convincing a court to enforce the agreement even though the courts have a history of overturning such agreements in all but the most serious of disputes.

Even Jimmy John’s conceded in a written statement that holding restaurant workers to non-compete agreements was a bit absurd:

“We made clear to the Attorney General that we would never enforce a non-compete agreement against any hourly employee that might have signed one. We offered to have our CEO sign a declaration to that effect, and pointed the Attorney General to an April 2015 ruling dismissing a federal claim against Jimmy John’s over the use of non-compete agreements, on the grounds that those agreements were not at risk of being enforced.”

Non-compete agreements are nevertheless popular. While the percentage of Canadian workers covered by non-compete agreements is not readily at hand, a White House analysis released just a month ago found that 18 percent of American workers are subject to restrictions on finding work elsewhere, including 14 percent of those earning less than $40,000 annually.

They even have their defenders. “Something strange is happening in the Beehive State,” law professor Nathan Oman wrote in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News this past March, as legislators were passing a new law banning non-compete agreements — a law Oman described as “a solution in search of a problem” and “a classic example of the legislative process run amok.” In defence of non-compete agreements, Oman wrote:

“In non­compete agreements, employees commit not to work for their former employers’ competitors if the employment relationship ends. This encourages employers to invest in their employees and share proprietary information. Everyone benefits, which is why employees and employers agree to the contracts in the first place.”

“In theory, such contracts could harm workers and consumers by giving monopoly power to employers. We solved this problem, however, more than a century ago. Like every other state, Utah law already requires that such contracts have reasonable limits on their geographic scope and duration. Indeed, any business that used them to monopolize a market would commit a crime under federal antitrust laws that have been in place since 1890.”

Others see non-compete agreements as being harmful to the overall economy even if they are beneficial for individual businesses by protecting secrets and calming competition.

On Twitter, I called the idea of requiring restaurant workers to sign non-compete agreements “asinine”. Martin’s response (in jest, I hope!) made my day. If you don’t already do so, follow me on Twitter at @kevinmcdougald

A 2010 research paper by three academics from the MIT Sloan School of Management, the INSEAD global business school and the Harvard Business School found that non-compete agreements were economically harmful by encouraging former employees to move away in search of work and thus “stripping enforcing regions of some of their most valuable knowledge workers while retaining those of lesser value.”

“To the extent that one can draw normative conclusions from the above findings, policymakers who sanction the use of non-competes could be inadvertently creating a potential regional disadvantage. From a regional policymaker‘s perspective, the free flow of particularly high-ability talent to the best opportunities seems beneficial as long as it occurs locally . . . whereas such talented workers who take out-of-state jobs are a loss to the region. Regions that choose to enforce employee non-compete agreements may therefore be subjecting themselves to a domestic brain drain not unlike that described in the literature on international emigration out of less developed countries.”

[…]

“…[E]nforcement of non-compete agreements might act as a brake on labor pooling in two ways. First, regions that allow firms to enforce non-compete clauses against ex-employees drive some of their most highly valued skilled workers out of the region, decreasing the local supply of talent. Second, the interorganizational mobility of those workers who remain in the region is lower when non-competes are enforced. Given the role of labor pooling as a microfoundation of agglomeration, we should therefore expect more clustering in regions such as Silicon Valley where non-competes are unenforceable.”

This was supported more recently by a U.S. Department of the Treasury report which found that, while non-compete agreements can protect trade secrets and thus encourage innovation, reward employers for spending more on employee training and reduce staff turnover, they can also lead to lower wages, cause people to leave the careers in which they are most productive, and slow productivity growth.

The Treasury report recommended, among other things, that employers be dissuaded from requiring non-compete agreements unless there is a high probability that they could and would be enforced (i.e., not frivolously or as a bluff, as in the Jimmy John’s case) and requiring that employees continue to be paid at partial salary by their former employers in exchange for agreeing not to seek employment with competing organizations.

The Jimmy John’s case, and the evidence above, suggests that it might be a good use of legislators’ time in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere to limit the use of non-compete agreements. While those in the business and legal communities might see such agreements as useful from their point of view, it’s a benefit that comes at a cost to the wider community. It’s also an example that there’s a gap between what’s good for business (or labour, which has made its own case for competition-limiting measures at times) and what’s good for the economy. The two are not always the same, or even compatible.

A new hire started work this week at Britain’s foreign ministry — and his lunch break lasts all day long.

Palmerston, a black-and-white shorthair cat, is the new Chief Mouser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s headquarters on London’s King Charles Street, kitty-corner (pardon the pun) to Parliament and just around the corner from the prime minister’s offices at 10 Downing Street.

Like his counterpart Larry, the brown and white tabby inhabiting 10 Downing Street, Palmerston’s duty will be to help the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) deal with its persistent rodent problem. To welcome Palmerston to the team, the FCO issued a tongue-in-cheek news release, quoted in The Telegraph:

Palmerston is HM Diplomatic Service’s newest arrival and in the role of FCO Chief Mouser will assist our pest controllers in keeping down the number of mice in our King Charles Street building.

Palmerston’s domestic posting will have zero cost to the public purrse as a staff kitty will be used to pay for him and all aspects of his welfur.

But has anyone thought to check Palmerston — or Larry — for any smuggled goods? To make sure he isn’t a secret agent for the Americans, the Russians, the Israelis or the Chinese?

Believe it or not, there actually was once an attempt to use a cat to commit international espionage.

In the mid-Sixties, the ever-imaginative CIA explored the possibility of enlisting a cat, with a microphone and transmitting antenna implanted in its body, to eavesdrop on conversations. It became known as the Acoustic Kitty Project.

“They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.”

“The work done on this problem over the years reflects a great credit on the personnel who guided it . . . [and their] energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers.”

But, “our final examination of trained cats for [censored] use in the [censored] convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”

* — See also the World War II Bat Bombs experiment, which tested the possibility of releasing bats over Japan with tiny bombs strapped to their bodies, and having them fly into the country’s many wooden structures to start fires. The tests took a disastrous turn when some of the bats were accidentally released, setting both a hangar and a general’s car on fire.

On April 19, Manitobans will go to the polls to elect 57 members of the provincial Legislative Assembly. That election will either turn the governing NDP into an opposition party in the Legislature for the first time since 1999, or, in the unlikely event that it is re-elected, into a statistical oddball.

Governments go through a life cycle. They start off fresh and new, even exciting sometimes. But, the longer they live, the more battle-weary they become. Sometimes a periodic shake-up and the introduction of new faces prolongs their lives, as it did for the long-running Alberta Progressive Conservatives who governed that province continuously from 1971 to 2015.

More often, however, governments find themselves running into natural limits on how long they can govern before the public tires of them.

Where are those limits? To figure that out, I looked at the life span of 41 Canadian provincial governments entering office after Jan. 1, 1960, and which left office prior to Jan. 1, 2016. By “government”, I mean a continuous period of party-rule. Thus, the current NDP government in Manitoba would count as a single government, even though it has been led by two premiers: Gary Doer (1999-2009) and Greg Selinger (2009-present).

The average lifespan of a provincial government during that time was 9.8 years, dropping to 8.9 years if one excludes Alberta’s 43.7-year Progressive Conservative government as an anomaly. This suggests that a government enters a vulnerable period as it approaches a decade in power, a time when voters might be looking around for something fresh.

This is further supported by looking at the “middle 50%” of governments, by filtering out the shortest- and longest-lasting 25 percent on either side of the continuum. Continuing to exclude the Alberta PC Anomaly, only one-in-four governments lasted less than 6.1 years, while only another one-in-four lasted longer than 11 years. This points to the difficulty (though not impossibility) of knocking off a first-term government, and the rapidly declining odds of survival after a decade in office.

Now let’s look at the extremes.

With the Alberta PC Anomaly still excluded, the bottom five percent of governments lasted up to 3.9 years before being thrown out. This includes Pauline Marois’s ill-fated 2012-14 Parti Quebecois government in Quebec, and Dave Barrett’s 1972-75 NDP government in B.C. The once-powerful Union Nationale’s 1966-70 Quebec government also finishes just above the cut.

At the opposite extreme, the longest-living five percent of governments lasted 16.1 years in office, these being the Progressive Conservative governments that ran Newfoundland and Labrador from 1972 to 1989 and New Brunswick from 1970 to 1987. The 1991-2007 Saskatchewan NDP government finishes just slightly below the cut. (I’m still excluding the Alberta PC Anomaly, as you can see.)

If making it into the top five percent of government lifespans represents “extreme old age”, the Manitoba NDP government crossed that threshold in about mid-November 2015.

It should be cautioned that elections can produce surprises, and that even improbable events — as a fifth term for the Manitoba NDP government would be — still happen once in a while. But these events are just that: improbable.

If the NDP loses the April 19 election, as they likely will, its old age and the desire to refresh things a bit will have played as much of a role in its downfall as the provincial sales tax increase, the party’s internal discord, and its weakening of internal discipline since 2011; though the public’s feelings about the latter three things will determine how deep a cut it takes in its seat count, and the party’s odds of staging a comeback in four years.

And if it wins and becomes one of the top one percent of governments in terms of longevity? Well, hopefully you will have placed and won a bet, as the government will have beaten the odds in a way that few Canadian governments ever have.

For at least a few minutes on Feb. 24, the world’s eyes turned to London as news broke of a hostage-taking at a Bella Italia restaurant near Leicester Square — a landmark location in a global business and cultural capital long vulnerable to terrorism.

After a few minutes, the world’s nerves eased as it was learned that, although a serious crime, the hostage-taking was neither technically a terrorism incident nor a long-running stand-off. As The Telegraph reported:

Police said that a man with a knife held a woman against her will inside the restaurant, with two other people also inside.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said the incident was not terrorist related.

All the people involved are believed to know each other and there have been suggestions on social media that the man is a disgruntled former employee.

Scotland Yard later said the incident had been been resolved and a man had been detained by police. There were no reported injuries.

Yet a strange thing happened on Twitter during and after the incident. In addition to many tweets passing the news on to others and expressing wishes for a peaceful end to the incident, Londoners used Twitter to express their frustration with the Bella Italia restaurant chain.

Bella Italia is roughly equivalent to Canada’s Olive Garden chain: family-friendly, but bland, unromantic and a bit cheesy according to reviews. As Londoners expressed their views on the chain, Twitter searches for Bella Italia quickly filled with absurdity, humour and snark:

Tragic end to the Leicester Square #BellaItalia hostage situation as the kitchen has now reopened

The year 2015 was at times a harsh one to the world’s Muslims who, because of the actions of Islamist extremists, found even the innocent and the law-abiding among themselves treated with everything from quiet suspicion to crude vitriol. And throughout the year, a question heard again and again: Why aren’t the moderate Muslims doing something?

Then, on Monday, came news from Kenya that illustrated the low regard that many Muslims have for those who carry out violent attacks, supposedly in the name of Islam.

That day, a group of al-Shabaab Islamist extremists attacked a bus travelling to Mandera, a town in northeastern Kenya near the Somali border. Upon boarding the bus, the militants ordered the passengers to split themselves up along religious lines: Muslim and Christian.

There was little doubt what the militants intended to do to the Christians aboard the bus. In April, gunmen attacked Kenya’s Garissa University College, singling out non-Muslims to be shot.

But the extremists who attacked the bus en route to Mandera on Monday found the passengers united across religious lines against them. As Reuters reported:

Abdi Mohamud Abdi, a Muslim who was among the passengers in Monday’s incident, told Reuters that more than 10 al Shabaab militants boarded the bus and ordered the Muslim passengers to split away from the Christians, but they refused.

“We even gave some non-Muslims our religious attire to wear in the bus so that they would not be identified easily. We stuck together tightly,” he said.

“The militants threatened to shoot us but we still refused and protected our brothers and sisters. Finally they gave up and left but warned that they would be back,” he said.

The BBC checked with the company that operated the bus, and received confirmation that “Muslims had refused to be separated from their fellow Christian passengers.”

Merry Christmas and Seasons Greetings to all.

And now a bit of lighter entertainment. The first clip comes from local public access television, circa late-’80s. After many years in oblivion, it resurfaced on YouTube a few years ago and soon went viral.

Candid Camera host/creator Allen Funt dresses up as Santa and talks to the kids in this Sixties piece:

And a bit of Christmas black humour, introduced to me by a good man named Carl (to whom I owe an overdue beer):

Post’s insights led me to search the public library catalog for any books written by him. Indeed, one of his books was available: The Mind of the Terrorist — The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to Al-Qaeda.*

And what a timely read that turned out to be, as the book ended up being my commuter reading during the same week that major terrorist attacks took place in Beirut and Paris.

As I write this, French police are seeking a suspect who is a Belgian-born French citizen; and one of the attackers on the Bataclan concert venue is said to have been born and raised in Paris as the son of an Algerian father and a Portuguese mother.

Anyone who has read Post’s book will be unsurprised by the prospect that the Paris attacks might have been largely planned and carried out by people born and raised in western Europe, who went on to murder their own compatriots. Post writes on page 225:

“Throughout Europe, there is an increased radicalization and recruitment of terrorists from second- and third-generation emigres to the global Salafi jihad, with estimates reaching as high as 87 percent of the new recruits coming from the diaspora. Although most Muslim immigrants and refugees are not stateless, many suffer from an existential sense of loss, deprivation, and alienation from the countries where they live. Their families had emigrated to Western Europe to seek a better life, but they and their offspring had not been integrated within the recipient society. They are then exposed to extreme ideologies that increasingly radicalize them and can foster entering the path of terrorism.”

Feeling “excluded and alienated” from “the rigid European social structure”, Post goes on to note that even those who were “[n]ot particularly religious . . . drifted back to the mosque to find companionship, acceptance, and a sense of meaning and significance. This in turn made them vulnerable to extremist religious leaders and their radicalization…”

Such lashing out would be as counterproductive as has always been the case whenever a denial of “companionship, acceptance, and a sense of meaning and significance” in the wider community pushes people toward radicalism.

“It is only when youth begin to be hopeful about their future and fully participate in their societies that we will see the plague of terrorism decline,” Post writes in the book’s final words. “And that will take a comprehensive program sustained over decades to alter these deep-seated attitudes, for when hatred is bred in the bone, it does not easily yield.”

Canada’s safety from terrorism can be more easily secured by being that society of hopefulness for the future and full membership for all, regardless of religion or ethnicity, which Post describes.